Nearly two-thirds of doctors believe patient safety has deteriorated over the past year and nine out of 10 have experienced staff shortages, a survey of 1,500 NHS consultant physicians in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has revealed.
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP), which carried out the study, said the results exposed a health system “pushed to its limit” in which doctors felt they could not deliver what was asked of them.
One told researchers: “We are not robots, we are human beings with limits.” Another said: “I cried on my drive home because I am so frustrated and distraught at the substandard care we are delivering.”
According to the study, 80% of those asked said they were worried about the ability of their service to deliver safe patient care in the next 12 months and 84% believed the workforce was demoralised by the increasing pressures on the NHS.
By all but one measure, doctors said conditions were worse than last year. In positive news, there was a reduction in the number of doctors experiencing delays in patients being transferred from their care.
“It is extremely worrying and depressing that our doctors have experienced an even worse winter than last year, particularly when so much effort was put into forward planning and cancelling elective procedures to enable us to cope better,” said the RCP’s president, Prof Jane Dacre.
“We simply cannot go through this again. It is not as if the situation was either new or unexpected. As the NHS reaches 70, our patients deserve better. Somehow, we need to move faster towards a better resourced, adequately staffed NHS during 2018 or it will happen again.”
The RCP proposed relaxing visa restrictions for health workers, making more money available to match growing patient need, including in social care, and more investment in public health initiatives that reduce demand.
Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of GPs, backed the recommendations made in the report. She said: “We have huge empathy with our hospital colleagues, and we know that GPs around the UK would echo their sentiments around increasing workload and concerns for patient safety.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are absolutely committed to making the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world, and more staff would now recommend their care to family and friends than ever before.
“We know the NHS is busy, that’s why we supported it this winter with an additional £437m of funding, and gave it top priority in the recent budget with an extra £2.8bn allocated over the next two years.”
The value of NHS hospitals treating private patients has been questioned in a separate report, which reveals that, far from generating extra cash, several hospitals have lost millions of pounds.
According to thinktank the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, private treatment was expected to become a significant source of income for NHS hospital trusts after the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.
But nine hospital trusts have lost money, in one case £18m over six years, and others have racked up bad debts from non-payment running into millions.
About 1,140 beds across 90 hospitals are set aside for private patients, the report stated. “Could they have made a difference to the many patients waiting hours for treatment in recent months had they been available for NHS care?” asked Dr Sarah Walpole, the report’s author. “It is not possible to say whether the NHS benefits financially from devoting resources to the treatment of private patients.”